Steven Rea

Contributing Movie Critic

Steven Rea is a movie critic. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics, author of the books Hollywood Cafe: Coffee With the Stars and Hollywood Rides a Bike: Cycling With the Stars, and producer at ridesabike.com.

More by Steven Rea

A wake-up call of epic significance, Surviving Progress is one of those documentaries that everybody should see - and, alas, a documentary that many will dismiss as politically slanted, while others just won't know it's there.

Still, co-directors Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, using British historian Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress as their template, deserve credit for assembling a daunting array of facts and theories and shaping them into a remarkably cogent, albeit remarkably alarming, film.

Wright, one of Surviving Progress' many talking heads, cites graffiti scrawled on a wall: "Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up." This is essentially the film's thesis: that just as earlier civilizations collapsed in a perfect storm of excess, environmental devastation, hunger, and inequity, our civilization - now global in dimension - is heading down the same path. And, at an incredible velocity.

Linking ecological and economic evidence, cultural patterns and commercial trends, and bringing home the point that modern man is essentially built on the same framework as the hunters and gatherers of eons ago - but "running on 21st-century software" - Surviving Progress does not paint a pretty picture.